TIL: The highest bounty ever paid out in history was given to a white hat hacker for finding out a vulnerability in the Polygon network earlier this month.

Gerhard Wagner found out a critical vulnerability about the Polygon network on October 5th 2021. He was paid $2 Million from Polygon for finding out about this vulnerability that affected the Polygon plasma bridge.

The Polygon network would be at risk of losing approximately $850 Million if this bug wasn't found. If an attacker spent just $100,000 dollars, the Polygon network would lose more than $22 Million dollars each time. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to exit their burn transaction from the bridge up to 223 times. Meaning the Polygon network could've lost up to $850 Million.

TLDR: A white hat hacker was paid $2,000,000 for finding about a bug in the Polygon network that could've caused Polygon $850,000,000. This is the highest bounty ever paid in history.